David Tripp is the Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Sage Dental.
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As employers continue to focus on the fourth quarter and plans for 2023 are being finalized, strategies that enhance employee engagement in the current work environment have become critical tools to ensure a company’s success. Considering the lingering impact of the pandemic, the fallout of the Great Resignation and the specter of what has been dubbed “quiet quitting,” the need to ensure workforce satisfaction has become a key focus point for human resources teams in virtually every industry.
A key step to better cultivate an engaged workforce is to establish programs that drive employee engagement as well as reward managers who foster it. By identifying leaders in an organization who want to improve engagement and establishing systems for measuring the program’s success, organizations can work to improve retention rates, reduce turnover and create a healthier work environment for employees at all levels.
Employee Engagement Begins When Managers Engage With Employees
If there’s a particular job function in an organization with historically high turnover, the first step to remedy this often entails working directly with those who manage these roles to identify what is causing the issue. For example, if office manager roles are continually being vacated and refilled, the person in charge of office managers might need to be trained on how to be a better coach or mentor.
By engaging with team members and gauging from them what the pain points of that person’s job are—dissatisfaction with compensation, bandwidth to perform daily tasks, opportunities for advancement, etc.—managers can help identify what’s causing someone to disconnect from their role. Leadership needs to empower managers to give disengaged workers “a voice” and by doing so, an individual who may have previously considered leaving the company instead feels they are valued as their concerns are now being recognized.
Successful engagement programs work from the top down—leadership needs to engage management who, in turn, need to engage with employees. By taking this approach, employees can become more committed to their job and feel that they are participating in the company’s success. This plays a critical role in helping an organization avoid the perils of the Great Resignation as well as the aforementioned quiet quitting, which occurs when an employee does as little as possible in any given workday. In the past, other more commonly known terms for quiet quitting included describing someone who is “coasting” in their role or “phoning it in.”
(Perhaps Peter in the movie Office Space summed it up best when it comes to quiet quitting: “...my only real motivation is not to be hassled. That and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that’ll only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.”)
Be Nimble: One-Size-Fits-All Does Not Foster Engagement
Another key to improving employee engagement is making sure company policies and procedures are as flexible as possible when it comes to things like remote and hybrid working schedules, compensation and performance reviews, and internal communications. In terms of communications, a well-designed, continually updated company intranet that gives employees a central resource to stay up to date on company news, access to benefits and other HR functions, and a range of other information can help keep employees engaged.
Flexibility in terms of employee compensation and performance reviews can be a welcome alternative to the standard of conducting annual reviews, which may work for some roles within an organization but not all roles. By offering a nimbler approach to the review process and recognizing deserving employees with a bump in pay or a bonus that occurs outside of the parameters of a 12-month cycle, individuals feel valued as well as pleasantly surprised by recognition that feels spontaneous versus scheduled.
Internal communications are another area where flexibility and variety of messaging help to foster employee engagement. Whether the message is part of day-to-day communications or the result of an unforeseen event, it’s important to ensure that information that’s critical to only certain employees is not delivered to the entire company. For example, many of my company’s offices are located in Florida and the recently active hurricane season has called for timely and coordinated communications to ensure the safety of anyone who works in the path of an oncoming storm.
Lastly, enhancing employee engagement involves a two-way dialogue between leadership and the workforce. Using the example that was cited earlier, if the C-suite is asking management to report back to them why certain roles like office managers have the highest turnover rate in the company, the leadership team needs to be prepared to do something to address the feedback they’ve asked for. Improving employee engagement doesn’t begin and end with the individuals who feel disconnected—it’s a company-wide strategy for everyone at every level.
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